Focused on the Music, Vol. 5

Top 75 New Albums of 2012.


Part V -- Numbers 30-21:



30.  The Evil Empire of Everything
Public Enemy

 

The second of two albums released in 2012 to commemorate their 20th anniversary, this album sets out to make a statement about the fate of a nation.  Be it the economy, immigration, welfare, warfare or race relations, no stone remains unturned, no dark corner unexposed by the lyrical spotlight of Chuck D.

Unfortunately, a kid in a hoodie hijacked the first half of what would have been an excellent album and PE spends six songs bemoaning the fate of the black man in a white man's world.  It's overkill and spills past the fifth track, Beyond Trayvon and the album really doesn't recover until after the Flavor Flav palate cleanser 31 Flavors, a full six tracks in.

It's not that we don't think racism is still a problem in America -- it is.  It's that until there's an actual trial and verdict in the George Zimmerman case, we might not want to put Trayvon Martin up as the poster child.  Give him a song?  Sure.  Expand that into a discussion on racism?  Absolutely.  Beat your listener down with over twenty minutes of bitching about a problem that, while still present, is much better than it ever has been?   That's a good way to knock a Top Ten album into the 30's and necessitate Flavor rebooting the album at track 7.

From then on, this album is greatness.  Chuck D spares no rod and spoils no child, as he tears through foreign policy ("One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"), immigration (Deserted in the desert\Wild wild west\Hurt to the dirt\Anti-immigration against brown skin\Sounds like brown shirts"), racism ("From the pages of the Cress Theory\I know you hear me") or the state of hip-hop ("Sometimes fame ain't got nothin' to do with work"). 

This album had the potential for greatness.  Perhaps it's fitting that, much like the fragile state of improved race relations, it was derailed by something so simple as a random act of violence on a Florida night. 

Or favorite track: Riotstarted (feat. Tom Morello & Henry Rollins)



29.  ¡Uno!
Green Day

Green Day of the last decade has essentially been current-day Queen.  Rock operas and "message" albums and all manner of ostentationness.  Enough already with trying to transcend the genre.  It was time to shut the hell up and play.

With this, the first of three albums released in two-month increments during the second half of the year, they do just that.  Simple chords, easy lyrics and a return to the sound that made them famous in the first place.  Nothing earth shattering.  Nothing revolutionary.  Just straightforward songs about sex, lust, fighting the man and being the shit. 

After ten years of beating us over the head with their self-importance, this was exactly the record they needed to make.

Our favorite song: Sweet 16

 

 

28.  Psychedelic Pill
Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Yet another act who released multiple albums in 2012, this was the second record put out by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the followup to June's kiddie-songs-redux Americana.  This time it was all original material and, yet again, Young scoffs at convention.

In 2010, Young took a guitar and amp into a studio and created an album using nothing else.  He then recorded a bunch of songs typically heard in a nursery school and released it as Americana.  This time around, he's reviving AOR.  With two songs stretching past the 15-minute mark and an opening cut running 27:36, dude is clearly unconcerned with the admonition that, "if you're gonna have a hit, you've gotta make it fit", as lead single, Walk Like a Giant [43], comes in at 16:27.

The 15-minute track is a forgotten art and that's a shame.  When a song goes this long, it gives the artist myriad opportunities to allow the music to express what words cannot.  In this world of instant gratification and incessant impatience, it's nice to be able to take the time to let the art develop.



27.  Clockwork Angels
Rush

We're staying north of the 49th parallel here for a bit for an album that took a couple of years to be released.  In June of 2010, Rush released a single, Caravan, with a "b-side" of BU2B.  We worked with a guy who loved Rush, so we bought it and surprised him with it.  Then in 2011 they released the single Headlong Flight (198, 2011) before finally turning the whole album loose this June.

We've not been typically been all that into prog rock but our buddy has made some headway in helping us at least appreciate it some.  The musicianship on this album is superb and, despite clearly having been pieced together over the course of a few years, the record has an absolutely cohesive sound.  It's a rich, full-texture album that makes for an interesting listen.  We're not particularly fond of Geddy Lee's voice (sorry Kelly) but it works within the context of the material.

Our favorite tracks, Carnies (81) and The Wreckers (currently charting) are probably the most straightforward, non prog-y songs on the album, which probably makes sense.  Still, we find this to be the kind of record we notice something new about with each listen and we're glad our buddy turned us onto it.

An interesting note on this album is the cover art, wherein a clock with alchemical symbols rather than numbers shows the time to be 9:12pm, or 2112 in military time, a clever nod to their album of the same name.



26.  XXX
Asia

We'll admit we had no idea Asia was also a prog-rock band.  We knew Heat of the Moment, Only Time will Tell and...yeah, that's about it.

So when we bought this album we were thinking 80's pop band with new material (XXX representing their 30th anniversary) and were hoping for fresh over faded.  The first time we heard the album we hated it because it was so far from where we were coming as listener.

We put it aside for a while and gave it another try and, much like Rush's Clockwork Angels, it grew on us.  Bury Me in Willow would have been a Top Ten single in 1986 and Faithful  makes a good run at the standard power ballad.  The intensity of I Know How You Feel comes pretty close to recapturing the sound of their early 80s hits, while not leaving them sounding like a band living in the past.

The lyrics on this record aren't always up to the task of the formidable music and the call-and-response harmonies on Al Gatto Nero don't quite work but those shortcoming aside, this is a solid effort and a personal revelation to us of a band that had more depth to it than we'd previously known.

Our favorite song:  Face on the Bridge (30)



25.  ¡Dos!
Green Day

The second Green Day release of the year (¡Tre! was released after the 15 November cutoff) is markedly better than the first installment of the trilogy.  Whereas ¡Uno! was a regression to the mean kind of record, ¡Dos!, while still maintaining that connection to the roots, starts to expand upon the sound and experiment some.

The album opens and closes with Billy Joe Armstrong strumming and singing a ballad.  In between there is ribald funk, nods to everyone from The Strokes to James Brown, great musicianship and a fucking rap song!  And the rap song, Nightlife, (featuring a great Mike Dirnt baseline), is actually not the worst thing we've ever heard.

Our worst fear was that these three albums would essentially sound the same, basically being a bunch of songs recorded at the same time and divided into three albums as a marketing trick (the band is only getting credit for one album on their contract from the trilogy).  Most bands go into the studio with way more songs than they need for an album and the bad ones never see the light of day.  What we hoped was not happening was that we were getting all the shit along with the 15 or so songs that were album-worthy.  This doesn't appear to be the case, as evidenced in the progression of quality from ¡Uno! to ¡Dos!.  We're really looking forward to ¡Tre! now.

Our favorite track: the Foxboro Hot Tubs-sounding Stray Heart.



24.  Former Lives
Benjamin Gibbard

Ben Gibbard takes a step away from Death Cab for Cutie with this, his first solo album, recorded in the wake of his divorce from the New Girl.  Playing almost all of the instruments and singing both lead and background, he explores the usual emotions of love and, more often, love lost, with odd effect.  While these are songs he has written over the course of the last decade but never recorded, they are amongst the least-specific of his songwriting career.  Whereas his work with Death Cab, by definition more collaborative, are quite specific in subject, this project, created almost entirely alone, lacks all such specificity and as a result, is probably the least personal we have heard him.  Whether this is a defense mechanism or just how it worked out, we don't know.  Still, we walk away from this solo album not knowing more about Ben than we did before.  While that feels like a lost opportunity, we can't help but like this album. 

As he shed "Ben" for "Benjamin", he also eschewed the urge to pick the ingénue du jour for signature duet Bigger than Love (currently charting), instead opting for Aimee Mann -- a clear effort to transform from tortured artist wise beyond his years to simply one who is wise, as he explores alt county (Broken Yolk in Western Sky), blues and even mariachi music (Something's Rattling [Cowpoke]).  This is the rare album that sounds just like what it is -- a collection of songs written at very different times, with different moods and motives, that still work together as a set.

Ben may have had it rough over the last few years in his personal life but Benjamin is better for the wear. 

Our favorite track: Gibbard's ode to hometown Seattle, Teardrop Windows



23. Glad All Over
The Wallflowers

We didn't know what to expect here. It had been seven years since the last Wallflowers album, 16 since Bringing Down the Horse. Were we gonna get something similar to Jakob Dylan's excellent Women and Country (Number 4, 2010), a soulless money grab or a bad nostalgia trip?

Turns out, we got none of the above. It's no mistake that the first single to this album is entitled Reboot the Mission. That's exactly what they have done here: they have taken their core sound and expanded on it without gimmick; they've reflected on it without looking backward. As a band that tried to be the voice of a decade, they do an exception job of showing us how those kids in the early '90's turned out, what whey deal with now and how they articulate it.

Like a beaten leather jacket that just feels right when you put it on -- but still looks great when you do, we slid right into this album and its two solid opening tracks, thinking this is about where we'd expect the band to have evolved. Then the next five songs showed us how much we underestimated them.

First One In the Car, aside from a bothersome lyric and potential grammatical error at the end of the chorus is an instant Wallflowers classic in their heyday style.  First single Reboot the Mission introduces the new drummer and serves as a de facto mission statement for the record (pun unintentional).  It's a Dream carries things along nicely until the spectacular Love is a Country, which is quite possibly the best song they have ever recorded.  Just when we were recovering from being blown away from that song, the band goes full-on, "Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch" on Have Mercy on Him Now before scaling things back to earth or, in this case somewhere below that, with The Devil's Waltz.

Performed flawlessly, yet with just the right amount of restraint, the music cloaks Dylan's lyrics in a shroud of something close to spirituality. The effect is stunning and absolutely took us by surprise.

Our biggest fear with this album was that some A&R douche at Columbia Records would get a hold of it and kill it through poor single selection, leaving Love is a Country and Constellation Blues by the wayside, in favor of songs more similar to the band's older stuff. Fortunately we were wrong, as Love is a Country was recently named the second single. This is fortunate because more people will be prompted to purchase this excellent album, having heard it.



22.  The Haunted Man
Bat for Lashes

Raw. 

Natasha Khan, who uses the stage name Bat for Lashes, is emotionally raw in this album.  She appears naked on the album cover.  No air brushing, no makeup -- hell, it's even a black and white photo.  But there she is, carrying the weight of a naked man on her shoulders, like so much emotional baggage.

That's what this album is, a painstakingly poignant portrait of navigating through the ghosts of one's past, as we evolve into who we are meant to become.  From the grandiose title track to the spare Laura, the answers are at times as complicated as the questions.

If life were simple, why would anyone bother exploring it?



21.  Tempest
Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan of the 21st Century is a gravelly old man who can regale you with tales of basking in the glow of the love of a woman or scare the shit out of you with the story of her husband kicking in the door and gunning the bitch down.  He rasps and hacks and wheezes his way through his stories and you can't help but listen with rapt attention, for when he's gone, so are the tales.

And that's the reality of being a fan of a 71 year-old man who still smokes like a chimney. 

Tempest is a lot like Dylan's recent work, in that it has a very organic, rootsy feel to it.  The music is very much alive and comes from a place that feels much more sincere than much of his earlier work.  Now, be it the state of the world or simply the state of his mind, this album is also much darker than anything we've heard form Freewheelin' Bob in quite a while.  Even the song names are aggressive:  Pay in Blood, Long and Wasted Years, Tempest (the latest of which is a 14-minute retelling of the only voyage of the Titanic).  Aside from that shipwreck, Dylan sings of a murder/suicide on Tin Angel, genocide on Early Roman Kings and the murder of John Lennon on Roll on, John.  Dark stuff.

Even the lighter fare has a dark twist to it.  Soon After Midnight ends up as a love song in the 50s spare rock vein but not before the target of Bob's affections takes all his money and he passes over "the killing floors", encountering Charlotte the harlot who dresses in scarlet.  Good times, indeed.

We're glad Bob Dylan lets us sit on the porch with him and listen to his stories.  We'd just better stay the fuck off his lawn. 

Our favorite track: We were unable to find a decent copy of Soon After Midnight online, so here's a link to the album's lead single, Duquesne Whistle.


Up Next: Numbers 20-11. Previous: 75-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31